Monthly Archives: February 2013

Bruce Babbitt says President Obama is not a good enough environmentalist. Last week the former Interior Secretary and one-time presidential candidate made a remarkable speech, in which he accused the Obama Administration of failing to maintain a balance between energy development and conservation. He claimed that the Administration has allowed 6 million acres of land to be leased for energy development, while permanently protecting only 2.6 million acres. His solution is to recommend a new policy that every acre leased for energy development ought to be accompanied by an acre permanently “set aside for conservation.”

Like we must be punished for our reliance on energy – an eye for an eye, an acre for an acre.

Babbitt is a grand master of spin, but this one strains credulity even for the most gullible. He made it sound as if we are in a race to drill and destroy vast tracts of public lands for corporate profits, while we ignore the dire need to protect the last great places from….. well I guess he didn’t say what these places need protected from. He trashed House Republicans who he says are “more interested in throwing themselves off metaphorical cliffs than protecting any real ones.”

I know, right?

Has someone been drilling oil wells on the side of cliffs without our notice? Are cliffs across America falling down absent special wilderness protection? These rotten Republicans, he said, “will take up Big Oil’s cause and again call for a fire sale of public lands for corporate use.” Temper, temper. Fairly dishonest vitriol from someone who should understand that there is no sale of public lands – even if leased for oil and gas development, the land remains public forever and is restored at the end of the process.

What is missing from Babbitt’s diatribe is context, as usual with such proposals. If he really wants an acre-for-acre balance between land set aside for permanent protection and land permitted for energy production, then we have a lot of drilling to do!

Consider the raw numbers. The government owns almost a third of the United States, nearly 650 million acres of land, a large percentage of it underlain with oil, gas, coal, and other vital resources. The government’s primary oil and gas leasing agency, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), leases just under 38 million acres for oil and gas production – that’s about 5.6% of the government’s land. There are oil and gas leases also on some Forest Service lands and some wildlife refuges, but most leasing is on BLM land. And that number has been shrinking for years, not growing.

In 1990 the BLM leased 63.7 million acres for oil and gas. By 1993 (when Babbitt became Interior Secretary) that number had fallen to 41.8 million acres. By the time he left office in 2001 he had reduced the number to 37.9 million acres. It was increased slightly during the Bush Administration, but has declined steadily under Obama, back to the Babbitt level.

Babbitt was in charge, so he should know the number has declined. But of course, his point isn’t just about putting a stop to oil and gas development, though that is a favorite goal. He and his allies want continued designation of wilderness – areas where virtually nothing is allowed except walking quietly. That’s why Babbitt calls for lands to be “set aside” that have already been “set aside.” There are already 250 million acres of BLM lands, 193 million acres of national forests, 84 million acres of national park lands, and 150 million acres of national wildlife refuges. Those are already “set aside” from ever being sold.

To be sure, some of those lands might be available for oil and gas leasing, so Babbitt wants wilderness designations to prevent that. And wilderness advocates are clearly winning that battle. We have “set aside for conservation” not the 2.6 million acres he cited in the speech, but over 110 million acres officially designated as wilderness, never to be touched for energy or any other use again. That’s more than triple the amount of land where energy production is allowed. And it only scratches the surface, because that only includes land Congress has specifically declared wilderness. It does not include millions of acres “managed” as wilderness without congressional designation.

For example, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages some 540 wildlife refuges, but also 38 wetland management districts and 36,000 fee and easement “waterfowl production areas.” A wide variety of special land designations have also been used (some pioneered by Babbitt) to prevent energy development, including Research Natural Areas, Cultural Resource Sites, Historic Sites, Wild and Scenic Rivers, National Natural Landmarks, National Trails, National Marine Sanctuaries, Estuarine Sanctuaries, Biosphere Reserves, and parts of international networks like Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserves and Wetlands of International Importance. BLM and the Forest Service also use similar designations to add additional layers of “protection” beyond what Congress specifically authorized.

You can guess how much oil and gas drilling will be permitted in those areas. Similarly, outgoing Interior Secretary Ken Salazar proposed designating another 11 million BLM acres as “wildlands” and ordering wilderness management, without any congressional action. The proposal was so unpopular he had to withdraw it a year later because most Americans understand the dilemma of a nation that depends on foreign oil while locking up its own.

You have to admit that Bruce Babbitt has always been consistent in his advocacy against public uses of public lands. But the idea that we should continue to wall off American resources badly needed in a stagnant economy is just consistently wrong.

When Congress passed its bill to temporarily avert the fiscal cliff, the legislation contained several unrelated measures that only congressmen could love.

Only in Washington are such crises seen as opportunities to spread gifts among friends. One example was an extension of the wind energy Production Tax Credit, a subsidy that helps a handful of businesses at the expense of our grandchildren.

“Although this deal is not perfect,” said Colorado Sen. Mark Udall, “I am glad my colleagues have acknowledged what I have spoken about regularly on the Senate floor: Wind energy creates jobs and benefits every American.”

Well, not exactly every American. In truth, wind power requires massive subsidies and cannot survive in a competitive economy without them.

According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, this one-year extension of the PTC for wind power will cost $12.1 billion in taxpayers’ money. One can understand the importance to Udall – about 5,000 Coloradans work in the wind energy business. But one has to wonder why all the other Coloradans should pay higher utility bills, and why their grandchildren should be saddled with unconscionable national debt in order to subsidize this one industry.

Absent these subsidies – which many experts have asked Congress to eliminate – Colorado’s energy would be supplied by businesses that compete in the marketplace, have long-term viability and do not require such tax credits to produce energy.

Oil and natural gas continue to be the most flexible, transportable, and affordable fuels in the marketplace today. Those who work in the exploration and production side of the oil and gas business are paid twice the average U.S. wage and don’t have to worry from year-to-year whether Congress will fund their jobs.

Today the U.S. oil and natural gas industry suports 9.2 million American workers. It also is responsible for 7.7 percent of the U.S. economy and sends an estimated $86 million every day to the U.S. Treasury in taxes, royalties, bonus bids, and other payments. Oil and natural gas companies receive the same tax incentives as others in the manufacturing sector, but their products’ value far outweighs those incentives, many of which are designed to help mom-and-pop energy companies defray the high costs of drilling wells.

Oil and natural gas products fuel more than 95 percent of U.S. transportation; provide chemicals for myriad consumer items from medicines to running shoes; power manufacturing plants, homes and business; and are a necessary component even of wind turbines, solar panels, and other energy sources.

Oil, natural gas, coal and other fossil fuels cannot be replaced simply by the wishful thinking of politicians, nor by taxpayer-funded freebies handed out to a few friendly companies. No other energy source offers the same advantages and can be produced in large enough quantities to supplant oil and natural gas, especially with dramatic increases in American production.

And that fact worries oil and gas critics. So they pressure Congress and the White House to fund pie-in-the-sky ideas.

In the past four years, the government has spent over $90 billion on Solyndra-like projects under the guise of reducing foreign oil dependency, and justifying it with scare tactics about peak oil or modern technologies such as hydraulic fracturing.

Yet despite the weak economy, the constant barrage of criticism and the regulatory tirade of the EPA, the American oil and natural gas industry has quietly stepped up U.S. production, leading the International Energy Agency (IEA) to predict that the United States soon will become the world’s top oil producer by overtaking Saudi Arabia by 2020. Energy analysts say U.S. oil dependency could become a thing of the past.

The United States has an abundance of oil and natural gas. If our nation adopted pro-development policies, 1.4 million jobs could be created by 2030, according to a Wood Mackenzie economic analysis. It’s estimated that 85,000 new jobs could be created in Colorado alone.

But Coloradans will not fully experience the benefits of increasing oil and gas production unless elected officials get serious about energy production – especially since the federal government owns most of the state’s energy-producing land.

For 20 years, wind energy has been heavily subsidized. As 47 House members recently wrote in a letter to Speaker John Boehner, “[It] is time for the federal government to stop picking winners and losers in the energy marketplace.”

While mandating that Americans pay more in taxes this year, it made no sense for Congress to extend the costly wind PTC. We have better and more reliable energy resources right under our feet.